157 posts from February 2013

Thursday, February 28, 2013

A man has been charged with felony stalking after authorities said he spent hours placing phony orders for pizza for his estranged wife.....During his bond hearing, (the defendant) uttered the word “bitch” and spit on the floor while (the prosecutor) was reading charges against him.

The heralded Washington Post reporter first ran into trouble with an op-ed on the sequester, which included a series of factually-inaccurate claims. Instead of running a correction, Woodward doubled down on his mistakes. As criticism mounted, Woodward appeared on MSNBC yesterday to criticize President Obama, complaining that it's "madness" for the White House to follow federal laws written on a "piece of paper," giving the impression that he thinks it's inexcusable for the president to honor laws duly passed by Congress....Steve Benen, Maddowblog

A roundup of state and local news-review and weekly political chat shows. Descriptions provided by the broadcast outlets in most cases:

Chicago Newsroom CAN TV: Host Ken Davis is joined by Carol Felsenthal (Chicago Magazine) and Mark Konkol (DNAInfo Chicago). They discuss Robin Kelley's 2nd Congressional District primary election win. Was it a victory for gun safety or a victory for Super PACs, this one run by New York Mayor Bloomberg? You may subscribe to the audio version of the Chicago Newsroom podcast on iTunes

Connected to Chicago (mp3) WLS-AM Host Bill Cameron sits down with the winner of the 2nd District’s Democratic primary, Robin Kelly. Bill also provides a unique look at the provocative debate over guns and gay marriage in Springfield and heads the roundtable discussion with Ray Long of the Chicago Tribune, Lynn Sweet and Fran Spielman of the Sun Times. On the docket this week: the link between castration and gun control, the influence of New York’s mayor on Illinois’ 2nd District, Bob Woodward’s ‘spat’ with the White House and much more.

All the excuse we in the media seem to need to turn a minor gripe or pique into a major story is

a) the filing of a lawsuit

b) the introduction of legislation

This story, to wit. Note that is never says that the plaintiffs who allege Anheuser-Busch is watering down its beer have found this to be true in testing. Indeed NPR this morning aired a report in which the network hired an independent analyst to perform an alcohol-content test, and found that no, the beer tested was not watered down:

Tests conducted on Budweiser, Bud Light Lime, and Michelob Ultra this week by San Diego's White Labs found that "the alcohol percentages inside the cans were the same as what was stated on the can," says analytical laboratory specialist Kara Taylor. "Some of them were spot-on. Others deviated, plus or minus, within a hundredth of a percentage" — well within federal limits, she says

I'm not impressed. The charm of many viral videos is how they capture highly unusual, one-off moments that, sure, in many cases could be staged. The appeal of a hoax is that it takes in the credulous and the gullible; inspires them to believe something that, hey, come one, is obviously not true. And that's not the case here. Could a pig swimming across a pond either by accident or on purpose nudge or frighten a goat into swimming to shore? Sure. So were those who believed this video fools or dupes?

It's telling that, as congressional Republicans prepare to give the president flexibility to pick and choose which spending to cut, the White House wants no such authority. Having it would undermine the message that the sequester is a GOP-inspired assault on Americans, and would expose Obama to criticism if his agency heads make unpopular choices....Tribune editorial today

It's a bad-faith argument to contend that President Obama wanted the sequester cuts, that he owns the idea of this next phony crisis the way he owns, say Obamacare.

Everyone in both parties realized and agreed that the sequester was an idea deliberately constructed to be bad -- sort of like putting a northbound train and a southbound train on the same track facing each other 10 miles apart. Each engineer had to put the brakes on or there would be a nasty crash.

And the sequester was inspired purely by Republican intransigence on the debt ceiling; a temporary fix to forestall a crisis that GOP brinkmanship had created.

It's also a bad-faith argument to suggest that there are significant politically easy spending cuts out there just ready to be made if only the Democrats weren't just so many hogs at the trough.

That's why so much of the commentary from the right on this issue contains so few specifics and so many airy abstractions and demands to cut spending: Most significant spending cuts are really unpopular.

Reform entitlements? OK, how, exactly? Raising the age for Medicare eligibility simply shifts the cost of health from the comparatively efficient Medicare system to the vastly more expensive private health insurance system (if you want to get good and depressed about this subject, set aside an hour or so and read Steven Brill's infuriating Time cover story, Bitter Pill: Why Medical Bills Are Killing Us).

Giving the president the "flexibility" to be responsible for making unpopular cuts is simply more ridiculous gamesmanship from Republicans who are looking for a way to keep their fingerprints off the cuts that will happen because they're unwilling to close loopholes that benefit only the very wealthy as a way to begin to meet the White House halfway.

That said, those who are predicting that all this doomsaying will backfire on Obama probably have a point. Friday will not see the earth open up and swallow our economy. The pains will be slight at first and the overall effect a more of a drag than a depression. The GOP strategy and the Obama realization seems to be that, no matter who gets the short-term blame, presidents tend to "own" the economy in the long run.

As I read the current Republican message it's 1. The sequester is Obama's idea. 2. Overall it's a good idea to cut spending in any way we can cut it and these cuts won't really hurt. 3. But to the extent that they do hurt, please see No. 1.

Here's guessing that when the state's top Democrats gather these days, they're superstitiously avoiding mention of the coup attempt brewing in the Illinois GOP.

Goodness knows they don't want to jinx it.

The Illinois Republican State Central Committee has called a special meeting for March 9 in Tinley Park where the more socially conservative committeemen will try to muster enough votes to oust state party chair Pat Brady (left) because he spoke out in favor of gay marriage.

"More and more Americans understand that if two people want to make a lifelong commitment to each other, government should not stand in their way," Brady told the Chicago Sun-Times when a marriage equality bill was before the lame-duck session of the General Assembly in January.

Brady noted that his position "honors the best conservative principles" because gay marriage "strengthens families and reinforces a key Republican value — that the law should treat all citizens equally."

It looks as though the Illinois House is moving to write a very narrow concealed-carry bill -- lots of exceptions are passing today -- which seems very likely to provoke a court challenge.

I get why so many folks don't want more guns on trains (I say more because there surely are already quite a few guns on trains), but banning concealed-carry on public buses and trains (update -- it happened) basically makes it impossible for a person without a car to exercise the right of self defense with a firearm that seems implicit in the recent federal court ruling.

If the law grants only the right to take a pistol with you when you walk the dog, or drive your personal car around, it would seem to be defying the Constitutional gravity of the court ruling -- like a law that said your right to be free from unreasonable searches applied only inside your house -- and ripe for being overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court.

Marissa Mayer, one of only a handful of women leading Fortune 500 companies, has become the talk of Twitter and Silicon Valley for her controversial move to end telecommuting at the struggling Internet pioneer [Yahoo, Inc.]....

Hundreds of staffers — including those who work from home one or two days a week — will have to decide if they want to start showing up every day at the office or be out of a job....

"To become the absolute best place to work, communication and collaboration will be important, so we need to be working side-by-side. That is why it is critical that we are all present in our offices," Jackie Reses, Yahoo's human resources chief, wrote in the memo sent out Friday. "Speed and quality are often sacrificed when we work from home. We need to be one Yahoo, and that starts with physically being together."...

Only a small percentage — about 2.5% — of American workers primarily work from home despite congested roadways, long commutes and the demands of caring for young children or elderly parents. But that number is growing at a rapid clip: up 66% from 2005 to 2010...

I was a telecommuting pioneer at the Tribune when I was assigned to a suburban office in the late 1980s but reported to a downtown editor who didn't care where I wrote and reported my columns from as long as I made deadline.

Given that my home computer was generations better than the computers in the suburban bureaus I began slowly shifting my operations home, a shift that became easier and easier as the Internet got better and better.

I only began shifting back a few years ago when I transferred from Metro to the commentary pages and rediscovered the value and pleasure of face to face meetings and conversations with colleagues.

But still I do half my work from home, where I find I'm more productive and, believe it or not, less distracted.

Your thoughts: Is face-time overrated? Does speed and quality suffer when you're not in an office setting? Are supervisors who are wary of telecommuting onto something, or are they control freaks?

If you prefer just a taste, I particularly recomment the 13-minute segment that opened part one, Rules to Live By:

So many of the shootings in the Englewood neighborhood of Chicago, the neighborhood where Harper High sits, are characterized as "gang-related." Often, the implication is that gang-related means there is a reason to the shooting — huge, established gangs shooting it out over drug territory. Gang-related often implies you must've deserved it, a certain level of 'what goes around comes around.' (WBEZ-FM Chicago education) Reporter Linda Lutton talks to dozens of Harper students who say adults don't understand that that's not the way it works. Gangs don't operate the way they used to. (13 minutes)

In a long-awaited leap forward for open access, the US government said today that publications from taxpayer-funded research should be made free to read after a year’s delay — expanding a policy that has, until now, applied only to biomedical science.<

A colleague at the Orlando Sentinel passed along information on these rallies planned for tomorrow, the anniversary of the shooting death of Trayvon Martin. The event on the right is a the University of Central Florida.

Democratic Sen. Daniel Biss has introduced legislation that would require police to get a search warrant before using a drone to gather evidence. Along with banning the use of lethal and nonlethal weapons on the drones — except in emergencies — the proposal would require information a drone gathers to be destroyed unless it is part of an investigation.
....

More than 20 states are pursuing similar legislation, according to the National Conference of State Legislatures. While some states are trying to regulate unmanned aircraft use, others are trying to impose moratoriums that ban them, Biss said.

Interesting how drones -- unmanned aircraft -- seem to get folks a whole lot more het up than conventional surveillance cameras. They can and do cast a much wider net, as it were, but it seems to me that requiring warrants beforehand removes their potential value as a crime solving tool -- following a stolen car to the chop shop, for instance -- and that it would be possible to put statutory limits on warrantless uses of the images without preventing the collection of the images in the first place.

Chicago Public Schools is considering a new sex education program that would discuss sexual orientation and gender identity for the first time, chief health officer Stephanie Whyte said.

The program, prompted in part by new federal and city standards on health education, would also present sexual abstinence as "a component of healthy and informed decision-making instead of an accepted norm," Whyte said.

Whyte plans to present the new policy to the Chicago Board of Education on Wednesday.

I doubt this will touch off a huge battle in the culture wars locally. Any responsible sex education program has to touch on orientation and gender identity issues, and any responsible sex educator should be able to do so in a descriptive, relatively value-free way.

The shift away from prescriptive lessons on abstinence may cause some "pro family" groups to go on the warpath, but it's lying to children to tell them that abstaining from sex until marriage is the "accepted norm" in our society. Better to emphasize abstinence as a wise, healthy choice for teens while stressing responsibility, moderation and contraception for those who make a different choice.

Years ago I suggested that a better name for Reality Check 2000, a "say no to sex" rally for 9,000 schoolchildren held at the UIC Pavilion, would have been "Morality Check 2000," and that a message of fear and shame was not the best way to encourage sexual responsibility. The National Abstinence Clearinghouse (abstinence.net) in Sioux Falls, S.D. took issue with me, which resulted in
this online debate in which I wrote the following:

The reason 17 out of 20 people reject your absolutist approach is that, in certain situations, such intimacy seems right and feels appropriate.

Having said that, though, I would agree sexual frivolity is generally ill-advised and results in many problems. And I'd agree that abstinence, self-restraint and caution deserve a respected, prominent place in our education system and our culture.

To the extent that organizations in the National Abstinence Clearinghouse lend support to anyone who chooses or is inclined to choose abstinence, I'm with them. But where they try to scare kids instead of encourage them and where they tell them that abstinence is the only rational choice an unmarried person can make, I part company.

I do expect that this shift will be demagogued with great zest should Mayor Rahm Emanuel ever run for statewide office or the presidency, just as Barack Obama found his utterly reasonable position on sex education grossly distorted and used against him by Sen. John McCain in the 2008 presidential campaign

About "Change of Subject."

"Change of Subject" by Chicago Tribune op-ed columnist Eric Zorn contains observations, reports, tips, referrals and tirades, though not necessarily in that order. Links will tend to expire, so seize the day. For an archive of Zorn's latest Tribune columns click here. An explanation of the title of this blog is here. If you have other questions, suggestions or comments, send e-mail to ericzorn at gmail.com.
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Contributing editor Jessica Reynolds is a 2012 graduate of Loyola University Chicago and is the coordinator of the Tribune's editorial board. She can be reached at jreynolds at tribune.com.